Northern light.

A new museum devoted to Filand's forest industries is a lyrical statement of materials, light and landscape.

Neither city nor even village, Punkaharju is a phenomenal geographical location: a low granite ridge in the east of Finland, a 60km spine of thick forest end road barely rising above the expanses of lakes that dominate the landscape of the region. The natural beauty of the Finnish landscape, that contingent relationship of land, forest, water and sky so often the subject of tourism advertisements, is nowhere more in evidence. Amidst the relative isolation of the region, the geological condition has yielded for only a few significant structures, notably the thirteenth-century island bastion of Savonlinna - now the site of an annual opera festival - and the Retretti arts centre, a series of galleries and halls blasted from the bedrock itself. As well, Alvar Aalto's 1956 church of Vuoksenniska, hard by the Russian border, lies at the eastern end of Punkaharju in the virtual shadow of a wood pulp mill, indicative of the often necessary connection in Finland between architectural accomplishment, the forest and the attendant forest industry.

This landscape forms the appropriate context for the newly opened Finnish Forest Museum and Research Centre, an outgrowth of the Finnish Forest Museum Foundation's efforts to establish a centre for research efforts and public education in the fields of forestry, forest industry, wood technology, wood architecture and the applied arts and handicrafts. The forest is, of course, an essential resource of the Finnish economy, but more importantly, despite the increasing urban character of the nation, the presence of the forest and the 'language of wood' remains central to the Finnish identity and, indeed, to the external image of Finland. With a research forest and facilities already in place in Punkaharju, the Finnish Forest Museum Foundation initiated plans in the late 1980s to construct a more public venue nearby in which to exhibit not simply technical knowledge of the forest, but the experience of the forested landscape. That vision has now received form in the Centre's wood-clad cylinder standing at the edge of the forest overlooking the Punkaharju lake system.

As with the Finnish Science Centre near Helsinki, better known as Heureka, the cylindrical forest institution has sought to adopt the more memorable name of Lusto, Finnish for the growth ring of a tree and the apt code-name for the 1991 first-prize competition entry by architects Ilmari Lahdelma and Rainer Mahlamaki. The strength and vitality of the Finnish architectural competition system is well known for encouraging younger architects to project new ideas and to enter the profession with independent, significant civic commissions; this is precisely the circumstance with Lahdelma and Mahlamaki. As students based at the department of architecture in Tampere (not, significantly, in the capital city of Helsinki) throughout the 1980s, and subsequently as architects, the two architects had collaborated in a loose confederation of talented designers in Tampere known as 8 Studio. The collective efforts of the team produced a rather astonishing record of competition success, yet such accomplishments proved frustrating, as competition awards were not always commissions. Built work and substantial recognition eluded the group even after winning the prestigious competition for a new main library in Espoo, the garden city west of Helsinki. But having relocated to Helsinki with their colleague Mikko Kaira, Lahdelma and Mahlamaki submitted three entries to the Forest Museum competition in the summer of 1991. Lusto, their winner, has become their significant competition-based public commission.

As such, it is an ambitious design of diagrammatic strength and abundant detail. The brief - to design fora distinctly modern exhibition and research programme - was also loaded with material indicators, technical responsibilities and psychological possibilities. The site, a gently sloped clearing with a southerly exposure, lies at the head of a small inlet off of the larger Lake Saimaa. A thick tree line and an existing access road to the established research forest and laboratories bounds the northern edge. With few other structures for scale or context, the architects established a strong volumetric geometry, a cylinder oriented to the north-south axis, as a main point of order in the landscape. Exhibition halls of varying heights, a 150-seat auditorium, extensive administrative offices, a cafe and service areas are contained wholly within the cylinder. Arrayed around and wedged through it are a series of smaller, orthogonally shaped elements in effective counterpoint: a bridge to bring the visitor across a grassed moat to a duo of rectangular entrance courts, a long, thickened screen wall which doubles as an outdoor display, an entrance canopy initiating an architectural promenade through the exhibition, a long switchback ramp returning the visitor to the north-south axis of movement and a view to the lake and forest outside, an exterior exhibition and service shed focusing that view as well towards a gridded bosk of trees. The directed view out from the building's interior towards the lake is laudable, but the view towards the singular building and its secondary components from the water and the lakeside drive is stunning.

The evident materiality of Lusto is immediately accountable for this glowing vision. Although the building drum is clearly a reinforced concrete structure (and the concrete work is by and large of a high quality), much of its external and internal surfaces have been clad in a variety of tamarack, pine and birch slats and panels. The long screen wall shielding the parking lot from the building, and the curved elevations of the drum are wrapped by a screen of horizontal tamarack slats, whose rhythm is then spaced or interrupted to allow for glazed openings, doors, stairs and ramp elements. The tamarack is a local wood, more resistant to moisture than an evergreen fir; its golden grain becomes the dominant exterior colour of the Museum. The play of light and shadow, transparency and enclosure, through this screen is a compelling study of a simple technique. A slight fragrance of tar pitch hovers around the wood screen, an aroma which, according to the architects, can arouse a multitude of memories associated with wood and fibre products, from shipbuilding to rope-making.

The consideration of construction and materials deepens the counterpoint between primary and secondary elements at all scales of design. The sound intention has been to steer clear of literal uses of wood. Geometry, as well as function, determines the contrast of materials used: stairs and ramps, for instance, are of concrete structure and glass enclosure and grey-painted steel is used in an understated support role, as columns for the entrance canopy or as a concealed frame for the service shed. In each case, the steel support structure is sheathed with a more tactile wood or fibre surface - for example, the entrance columns wrapped in thick hemp rope to the level of an adult's shoulders. The use of wood solely as a surfacing material, rather than as structure, is worthy of comment; especially on the interior, the wrapping of the concrete walls with birch panels beyond the point of tactile appreciation is problematic, as is the insistent, necessary appearance of visible black anodised screw heads at every joint line. However, the emphasis throughout, according to the architects, has been on the use of natural materials without artificial finishes and on the frank display of construction and attachment.

The interior experience of the Museum is enlivened by sectional slices through the roof of the drum to admit a variety of slanted natural light, illumination that penetrates into the double-height exhibition galleries at different times of the day. The curved rooflight functions as a kind of sundial for the visitor who, entering at the top level off of the entrance court, is propelled down the switchback ramp into the exhibition levels themselves. The overlapping of spaces and visible interconnection through slots between walls and bridges is inventive; the visitor is always returned for orientation to the absolute centre of the drum, tracing and re-tracing their steps across a giant horizontal slice of tree-trunk embedded in the floor, metaphorically always returned to the life of wood itself.

The architects participated less in the design of the exhibition installations themselves, and the sequence of displays is less integrated with the experience of the building. Yet the landscaped surroundings have been carefully worked out and there has been a clear collaboration between Lahdelma and Mahlamaki and Gretel Hemgard, the landscape architect, in the preparation of paths, views, plantings and water around the circumference of the cylinder.

With the deaths in the past year of Elissa Aalto and Reima Pietila, and with 50 per cent unemployment in the Finnish architectural and building professions, several observers have been moved to lament the passing of a heroic age of Finnish architecture, characterised as a practice of distinctive Modernism grounded in the essential nature of the landscape or as an expressive - yet misunderstood - morphology of that landscape. Within the past two years, both a 'new Finnish architecture' and 'the end of Finnish architecture' have been discussed, using the same recent architectural examples. Such judgements are both melodramatic and limiting, even as all periods of economic recession produce consequent cultural self-examination. The myth of the Finnish hero-architect may be an acceptable casualty of an increasingly pluralistic and critically reflective practice. Equally, that pluralism in Finnish design has yet to be fully appreciated and criticised by the infrequent architectural visitor. Cutting across personalities and stylistic preferences, what endures is an emphatic, recognisable quality to Finnish architecture, one consistently reliant on an attention to site and landscape, an ambitious statement of form, the knowing use of materials and light, and the desire for detail. On the eastern border of Finland, astride the Punkaharju ridge, the Finnish Forest Museum is a youthful representative of that quality.